Tag Archives: Pennsylvania

Avoiding the Rapture by Karen Weyant (Riot In Your Throat)

Posted on August 12, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Avoiding the Rapture by Karen Weyant (Riot In Your Throat)

     Karen Weyant’s Avoiding the Rapture explores life growing up and living in the rust belt towns of Pennsylvania. This is a place of woods and rivers and small town conservativism. She explores what it is to be an outsider, but not a victim in such a place, what it means to choose to be an outsider because the social mores and religious beliefs do not fit her or her belief systems. Instead, her Christian background blends with a modified Wiccan approach to spirituality enhanced by the natural world around her. The result is a collection that brought me back to the kind of childhood that I and many people of my generation spent as we wondered about our place in the universe. There’s a lot going on here, but two of the most interesting aspects of Weyant’s work is her understanding of how an adolescent’s world can be seen through the lens of magic and how an environment rich with water enhances that perspective.

     The narrator does not reject conservative religious belief, but she rejects the implications of it. One of the most powerful poems is ‘Tips for Young Girls Hoping to Avoid the Rapture’. In it, she sees the rapture as a profoundly positive thing because so many people are going to be taken away leaving her alone and ‘When everyone disappears, everything you see will be yours’ (9). So, she gives tips on ways to avoid being raptured: 

            Skip Sunday School lessons to skinny-dip in Tom Stetson’s Pond.

            Then, lie about where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing

            Practice swearing, use God’s name in vain. Ignore

            your parents (9).

This is funny, but it’s more than just that. It gets to a way that so many of us got through our youths in religious spaces that didn’t make sense to us. It was humor and subversion. It was seeing the world through alternative points of view. This alternative way of seeing and interacting with the world pervades her work even when it is not so overtly stated. In one poem, for example, she talks to insects in the half belief that she is able to communicate with them. This feeling follows her through her life:

            Even now, when you are old enough to know better,

            you walk by a vacant lot where a single katydid calls for winter.

            Its mantra, Kate, Kate, Kate is so insistent,

            you have come to believe that is your name (62).

It is a feeling that she is at one with nature and that becomes its own kind of religious belief system.

     This religious perspective is enhanced by all aspects of nature. Pennsylvania is a place of rivers and water figures large in the consciousness of the poet and her characters, whom are often obsessed by water and wading in it:

            During dry spells, you will become desperate, looking for puddles 

            at the local car wash or parking lots, where water

            is often speckled with tar or shining with car oil.

            Just watch. If you wade long enough, you will see

            permanent stains on your skin, a thin waterline tattooed

            above your ankle, or midcalf, or reaching just below your knee (24).

The character is becoming one with nature through water, and it seems to be a process that begins before she is born. In another poem, she describes her pregnant mother walking through water and suggests that doing so has primed the narrator to being close to the earth. Weyant writes, 

            Now, you smell flood waters before the waves swell:

            faint sulfur mixed with the moist dirt of a new garden.

            You hear the water before it spills, before it rushes 

towards West Main, lifting up swings at the park (19).

The magic of nature is another way that her characters survive and understand the worlds they have been thrust into. They gain a closeness to understand their place, almost as a replacement to the religiousness that they were supposed to feel.

     Avoiding the Rapture brought me back to my own childhood and adolescence, and I think it will for many of her readers, especially those of us who grew up in the seventies and eighties. It captures the way so many of us were affected by the zeitgeist of the time. It might have been a result of popular culture or something else, but it feels so familiar to me. It is the way I too perceived the world and to some extent still do.

John Brantingham 12th August 2024

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The Street by John Yamrus (Anxiety Press)

Posted on January 28, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Street by John Yamrus (Anxiety Press)

I have always loved John Yamrus’s minimalist approach to poetry, so it came as no surprise to me that I love his minimalist approach to memoir in his latest book, The Street. The Street is ostensibly about the street where Yamrus grew up and his childhood years, but it encompasses much more than that. In a postmodern and often meta approach to storytelling, Yamrus shows us what it was to live in a blue collar coal town in the Northeast, which might have been any working class town anywhere in America, while at the same time obliquely discussing the nature of memory and consciousness, what it means to perceive through the limited lens of ourselves. Also, because he is approaching his memoir through flash fiction vignettes rather than an overarching narrative, he creates a memory of a place more than of an event or series of events. In that, he is able to focus on what it was like for him to inhabit a small Pennsylvanian town in the 1950s and 1960s, what that culture and time was for the people who lived there. Because of this approach, it is a memoir of the street he lived on as much as it is a memoir of his childhood, as the title of the book suggests.

            The Street as a memoir of place rather than events explores all of those people, ways of life, and traditions that have passed on. This memoir, however, is not cheap nostalgia. He remembers the place with both love and bitterness. A largely Catholic community, he remembers the aggression and unkindness of religious people and leaders. The priests in his community are interested in controlling others, and the nuns are often angry. Religion is about dividing people. When he asks about why he is supposed to hate people of other religions, a nun depicts Hindus, and by extension all non-Catholics as unfeeling to the point of evil: 

they don’t value life the way we do . . . in their religion, they think that whatever happens is god’s will and there just no changing it and if they’re doing something like riding in a boat and someone falls overboard, they’ll just sit there and watch while that person drown right in front of them, even if it’s their own son or daughter or mother or father (77-78).

This is the kind of stereotyping and lies that he is given every day, and soon he learns to hate Jesus and the people who preach about him. That is not to say that this is a memoir rooted in bitterness; he simply does not remember everything as being perfect, and of course, no place is perfect. What he remembers with love are the people on his street. These were coal miners who cared for each other and died young because of the difficulties of their profession. He remembers how loving they were to each other and to him as well.

            The Street, however, is more than just a discussion of his life; he also discusses the nature of consciousness and memory, and how the rememberer constructs meaning. Early on in the book, he breaks into a scene to self-consciously discuss this idea: 

This memoir is going to be difficult to keep straight . . . for the reader as well as the writer . . . because memories aren’t linear (anyone who’s read Proust knows that) . . . memories are like leaves on a tree . . . and they fall at different times, at different speeds, in different ways . . . eventually, no matter how they fall, they end up covering the ground (30).

Throughout, he discusses not only what he remembers but also how he remembers it. He knows that his father was imperfect, as any person is; however, his father died at the age of 45, which was when Yamrus was young, so his memories are tinged with longing, regret, and hero worship: “he’d step out of that coal truck and it was like god coming down from heaven. the door would swing open and he’d step out, real slow, like a gunslinger . . . like Gary Cooper in High Noon” (27). This way of remembering the people and places of his past adds a level of realism to it. Rather than trying to find a kind of objective truth, he lets his truths be subjective when they need to be. The realism comes through his subjectivity because we all view the world in this way, through the lens of our own memory and consciousness. He comes back to this approach over and over until we understand that he’s talking about the nature of memory, his and ours.

            I think that Yamrus’s The Street is my favorite book by Yamrus, and that’s saying a good deal because I have always loved his approach. I did not grow up in a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania, but I felt at home in his world. He remembers his world as we all remember ours with the emotions that well up when we look back. 

John Brantingham 28th January 2024

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